1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless connection system that connects a host computer and devices by radio, an initial connection method therefor, a storage medium that stores a control program therefor, an information processing apparatus and an image forming apparatus that constitute the system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is a known technique that shares information called connection context (referred to as “CC”, hereafter) between host computers (referred to as “hosts”, hereafter) and printing devices (referred to as “devices”, hereafter) in order to establish secure connections among the hosts and the devices when constructing a wireless communications environment.
When using this technique, it is necessary to prepare the same number of CCs as the number of devices to be connected in order to connect the devices to the hosts. The CC consists of a unique host ID (referred to as a “CHID”, hereafter), a unique device ID (referred to as a “CDID”, hereafter), and a connection key (referred to as a “CK”, hereinafter) shared between the host ID and the device ID. There is a restriction that the host must not distribute the same CK among a plurality of devices.
Accordingly, the conventional technique employs a cable association using a USB cable or a numeric association that requires to input a predetermined number to both of the host and the device, at the time of an initial connection (referred to as an “association”, hereafter) between the certain host and the certain device in order to share the CC between the host and the device.
In an environment where a plurality of hosts and a plurality of devices are prepared, when a plurality of devices are to be connected to a certain host in a wireless communications environment, it is necessary to extract one-to-one host-device environment and to execute the association to each.
Although it differs from the wireless communications environment, the following techniques are known as a method of establishing connection between a local device and a remote device or between nodes via network environment. First, a local device generates an open value and a secret value, and imports an open value from a remote device via an out-of-band mechanism. Then, the local device generates a new secret value as a function of the open value imported from the remote device and the secret value generated by the local device. Further, the local device generates a symmetrical key for establishing the connection using the newly generated secret value (for example, see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-244988 (JP 2005-244988A)).
However, the conventional method of constructing the wireless communications environment must repeat the operation to extract a one-to-one host-device combination from among the environment including hosts and devices and to execute the association at the combination number of times. Therefore, a user as a manager is required to connect a USB cable and to input codes via an operation unit for each combination extracted in order to share the CC between the device and the host, which becomes a significant load on the user.
When the generating means of the symmetrical key described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-244988 (JP 2005-244988A) is converted into the wireless communications environment, although the security and reliability between a local device and a remote device or between nodes can be improved, the load on the user concerning the association cannot be reduced.